OpenAI President Greg Brockman: AI Could Make Death a Choice

OpenAI President Greg Brockman has predicted that artificial intelligence will deliver real medical breakthroughs within the next 12 to 18 months, and that the technology could eventually make death a choice rather than an unavoidable outcome.

Brockman, the cofounder and president of OpenAI, made the remarks at a WSJ Tech event. He acknowledged that curing diseases has become a familiar promise in the artificial intelligence field, one that has circulated since the launch of ChatGPT. His argument is that meaningful results are now drawing close.

"Having cures for diseases is something that's become also a trope in this field, but I think that you're gonna see real delivery and real significant strides and impacts on biology, health, and curing of diseases over the next 12 months, 18 months," Brockman said.

He then pushed the forecast into more extraordinary territory, raising the possibility that progress driven by artificial intelligence might eventually allow human beings to decide whether they want to die.

"I think that we all suffer, that the question of even just thinking about death becoming a choice. All of this is possible," Brockman said.

What did Brockman actually promise?

The president of OpenAI offered a two-part claim at the WSJ Tech event. The first part is a near-term forecast: significant, deliverable impacts on biology, health and the curing of diseases within 12 to 18 months. The second part is an open-ended possibility: that death itself could become a matter of human choice.

Brockman did not present either claim as a certainty. He framed the longer-term vision as possible rather than scheduled.

"I think it's gonna take time to really deliver on the full impacts, just by the nature of this field. But I think it's all possible and doable, and it's exactly the kind of thing we have these models that are solving these unsolved problems. Clearly, we need to apply it to biology and life sciences," Brockman said, according to a transcript shared by the account Fireside Alpha on November 5, 2026.

That framing matters for several reasons. Brockman is the president and cofounder of the company behind ChatGPT, one of the most widely used AI products in the world. When the president of OpenAI puts a 12-to-18-month window on medical results, the claim carries weight with investors, policymakers and researchers alike. It also raises the stakes for accountability, because previous disease-cure predictions tied to AI have not yet produced cures at scale.

Brockman's argument rests on the track record of current models. In his telling, AI systems are already solving previously unsolved problems, and the remaining task is to apply them to biology and the life sciences.

Who else is making longevity claims?

Brockman is hardly alone. A cluster of prominent technology figures and futurists have offered similarly sweeping assessments of what artificial intelligence could accomplish in medicine and human longevity.

• Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer at Palantir, said last month that some AI researchers are so convinced the technology will cure cancer that they have started smoking. Sankar described that confidence as "kind of this mass psychosis social delusion."
• Peter Diamandis, the futurist, predicted last year that 2030 could be a turning point for human longevity. His advice was to survive long enough to benefit from the anticipated advances, and he warned people not to die "from something stupid" before those developments arrive. Diamandis uses the phrase "longevity escape velocity" to describe a convergence of AI-driven technologies that he believes could transform human lifespan.
• Bryan Johnson, the millionaire biohacker known for his extensive anti-aging regimen, has said artificial intelligence is among the technologies that could eventually create a world in which no medical condition is automatically considered incurable.
• Elon Musk has argued that the body ages as a synchronized system, observing that people do not have an old left arm and a young right arm. Musk has said human beings are "programmed to die" and suggested the underlying programming could be changed to allow people to live significantly longer. In remarks shared by Fireside Alpha on November 1, 2026, Musk called longevity "an extremely solvable problem" and said, "I don't think it's a particularly hard problem."

Is there evidence behind the confidence?

The grand predictions are arriving alongside concrete, verifiable examples of artificial intelligence tackling complicated technical and scientific work. These cases help explain where the industry's confidence comes from.

• The cofounder of CentOS, the Linux distribution, recently built a Linux-compatible kernel in only 11 days, with artificial intelligence performing most of the coding.
• An AI-developed drug appeared in a clinical trial in which it made patients biologically younger, according to the report.
• Anthropic's Claude model attempted to solve the Riemann hypothesis, one of the longest-standing unsolved problems in mathematics. The model failed to crack the problem, but the effort produced an unexpected new finding.

Each example is narrow. A kernel built in 11 days is a software engineering achievement, not a medical one. A single clinical trial result does not establish a cure. A failed attempt at the Riemann hypothesis that yields a new finding demonstrates capability on research problems without settling them. Together, they show AI systems making progress on tasks once considered out of reach, which is the basis on which Brockman argues the technology should now be applied to biology and life sciences.

Sankar's counterpoint, delivered a month before Brockman's appearance, is the sharpest industry-internal criticism on record in the source material. His description of cancer-cure confidence as a "mass psychosis social delusion" signals that skepticism is not confined to AI's outside critics; it extends to executives at Palantir, a company deeply invested in the technology's commercial success.

Why does the control of AI matter here?

The examples of progress do not erase the risks surrounding the technology, and the source report frames the situation as an uncomfortable combination. Artificial intelligence companies continue issuing enormous pronouncements about the future while simultaneously seeking government regulation of their own industry, a pairing that puts the firms in the unusual position of shaping the rules under which they will operate.

The report presents the opportunities as real and the dangers as real: artificial intelligence offers major advances, yet it also presents what the report calls landmines capable of damaging humanity. That combination, the report argues, makes the fight over who controls the technology as important as the race to expand its power.

One entry in that fight is Wynton Hall, social media director at Breitbart News, whose New York Times bestseller "Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI" addresses the conflict directly. The book is presented as a guide for developing positions on artificial intelligence that benefit humanity. Hall's stated focus is preventing control of the nation from being handed to leftists in Silicon Valley while also blocking China from dominating the global artificial intelligence race.

Hall's book is one signal of how the control question has moved from technical circles into partisan politics, with AI policy becoming a front in domestic ideological conflict and in strategic competition with China.

What happens in the next 18 months?

Brockman's 12-to-18-month window is now the clock against which his own forecast will be measured. If AI-driven advances in biology, health and disease treatment arrive on that schedule, the claim that death could someday become a choice will gain credibility. If they do not, Sankar's description of industry confidence as a social delusion will look more persuasive.

What is not in dispute, on the evidence cited in the report, is that the models are already producing results: an 11-day kernel, an unexpected mathematical finding from a failed proof attempt, and a drug in clinical trials that reportedly made patients biologically younger. The open question is whether those capabilities transfer to biology and the life sciences at the pace the president of OpenAI now predicts.